


The Valedictorian

by RKMacBride



Category: Alias Smith and Jones
Genre: Gen, Happy, Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RKMacBride/pseuds/RKMacBride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commencement Exercises, Boulder, Colorado, 1914.  A retired outlaw's surprising legacy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Valedictorian

**Author's Note:**

> A many-years-later sequel to all my other AS&J stories. I was planning to wait and post this later after I'd written the earlier ones, but I decided to go ahead and post it since it was finished already. Enjoy.

Hale Science Building, ca. 1900

* * *

 

The Valedictorian

 

Location: University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

Occasion: Commencement Exercises, June 1914

 

          That June morning, the chapel of ‘Old Main’ was packed with graduates, faculty, and the audience, comprised of the graduates’ families, friends, and guests. President Baker spoke into the bulky microphone on its stand. “On behalf of the faculty, deans, and Regents of the University of Colorado, I am honored to present the valedictorian of the Class of 1914, Ellen Ruth Curry, Bachelor of Arts, Modern Languages, _summa cum laude_.”

          A slim grey-eyed girl of medium height with wavy auburn hair, in academic cap and gown, rose from her seat on the dais and approached the microphone on its stand. “Good morning,” she said, her long sensitive hands betraying her nervousness. “Greetings to my professors, classmates, and friends, and thank you for the opportunity to address you all on this June day in Boulder. My dad reminded me last week that I shouldn’t be nervous since there are a whole lot of things in the world scarier than standing here in Old Main making a speech—but right now, I can’t remember what they are!” She grinned, and a murmur of laughter went through the audience.

          “I guess I shouldn't be too nervous, though, since I've been planning this speech since I was about seventeen.  We all have; we kids all decided that someday, somehow, one of us was going to stand up in public and say some of these things.  It turned out to be me." She smiled. "Anyone who knows me at all is probably guessing that at a moment like this, I’m probably going to talk about the “olden days” and my family—and they’d be right. And I have their permission to ‘tell it like it is’—I do, really.” She smiled and held up a small slip of paper. “But I promise not to bring up any of Dad’s wild stories that my classmates are already tired of hearing _ad infinitum._ Instead, I want to talk about courage, and hope, and having faith in a future we can’t even imagine, much less see from where we all stand today. We’ve all learned a lot here in these last four years, but I want to talk about the lessons that I learned from my family before I ever came to C.U., and what those lessons can teach us all. 

          “You know that your family is a little unusual when you’re old enough to read and you realize the first two pages in the family scrapbook are copies of the posters saying your father and your uncle—yes, I know, he’s really my dad’s cousin—used to be **WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE**. But that’s the first lesson all of their kids learned as soon as we were old enough to understand—your past doesn’t have to be your future. You can leave the trail you’re on and blaze a new one instead.” Ellen Curry let her eyes roam the audience, and her gaze rested fondly on her parents, then the Heyeses, then her siblings Margaret, Andrew, and Matt, and her cousins—Edith, Joshua, the twins James and John, and Muriel, the youngest of the Heyes children. She was hitting her stride now, and the nervousness in her voice was gone. “There was a sunny fall day in 1879 when my father and his cousin, literally partners in crime, decided to just walk away from the proceeds of their last train robbery. They chose to give up that life, and take a wild crazy chance at maybe having a real future. It wasn’t out of any great moral epiphany, though—that happened later. Heyes and my dad just wanted to have a regular life like other people, with homes and wives and kids of their own, and not having to outrun a posse every other week. It was the biggest gamble of their lives, but I guess it paid off all right. We kids—there are nine of us, and every one of us finished college—are the future that they couldn’t have even dreamed of at the time they took that first step away from their old lives. Though about the time it was Matt’s turn to go to D.U., my dad started to wonder if that old Brooker safe was still on the bottom of that pond…” There were several laughs from the audience.

          “I’ve always thought that if Heyes and my dad had had any idea how hard, how awful the next few years would be, they might not have even tried it—they might have given up before they started. But no matter how bad things got, whatever struggles they had to go through, they wouldn’t give up. They had a lot of help from a lot of people they met along the way—which I’ll come back to in a moment—and they had the courage to keep on trying, keep on hoping they could make it, believing if they just hung on long enough and kept living right, the amnesty would come through. That’s the second lesson all of us kids learned. You have to have a goal, a dream, to reach for and you can’t give up on it, no matter what happens or how hard things get. I don’t know whether you want to call it perseverance, or determination, or just ‘stubborn as the day is long.’” She smiled. “Whatever you want to call it, you’re going to need a lot of that quality in your lives if you want to succeed in the future. There’s a lot of faith involved in that, too, and I don’t necessarily mean in a religious way. But it takes faith just to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, and that whatever it takes, it’s worth it to keep trying and not give up.

          “Now, I’ve left the most important lesson, the most crucial point, for last. And that is…” Suddenly Ellen’s voice broke, and she faltered for a moment. She looked once more into the audience. “If there’s one thing—one thing— all of us kids learned…” She met her father’s eyes, and started over. “When our fathers are Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry, there’s one thing we learned first of all. You can’t go it alone. For twenty-odd years, the two of them had to depend on each other because by 1860, there was no one else left in their family—it was just them against the rest of the world. We have stories, and more stories, and even more stories that we all heard growing up about some of the crazy and desperate things they had to do in those days to help each other, protect each other, even save each other’s lives time and time again. They would do anything in the world for each other, and they taught all of us to live that way too, to count on each other and guard each other’s back. If they’d tried to do what they did all alone, they’d have never made it. The Bible teaches us that ‘there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother’, and ‘a brother is born for adversity’; ‘a threefold cord is not quickly broken’; and ‘two are better than one, for they have a good reward for their labor; pity the one who falls and has no one to help him up.’ John Donne tells us all that “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Just living in this world is hard enough, so find someone to go through it with you. Depend on one another, lift up one another, help one another. Your family is precious; treasure them because in the end, they’re all you have.        

          “Which brings me to the end—there are quite a lot of people whom I need to thank. If it weren’t for them and what they did, I and my sister and brothers and cousins wouldn’t even be here. First of all, after my dad and his cousin, who had the courage to decide to change their lives, is their oldest friend, who believed in them, and gave them the chance to do it in the first place: Sheriff (now Marshal) Lombard Trevors.” She beamed at the white-haired mustached gentleman who’d slipped into the back of the chapel just as the commencement exercises had begun. “After him, I want to thank my mother Lillian Curry, and my aunt Paula Heyes. They are the strongest women I’ve ever known, and they were brave—or crazy—enough to get engaged to a pair of outlaws while they were still wanted men. They didn’t give up, either. And they had the faith, and patience, and love, to stick it out for the long haul, and wait however long they had to. And it all started, at least on my side of the family, with a square dance one Saturday night in Telluride, in 1880.

          “If I thanked everyone to whom I and my family owe this day, we’d all be here until the Fourth of July. So I’ll spare you the dozens of people I ought to thank, but I’ll mention a few: Jesse and Belle Jordan, Judge Hanley, Chester Brubaker, the late Charlie and Hannah Utley, Harry Briscoe—and a little old lady from Boston named Bertie Pickett. But she started it all by giving my dad the handbill about the Wyoming amnesty program.

          "Finally, my fellow graduates and classmates, congratulations on achieving the success that we celebrate together this day. Our families are proud of us, and we are proud of ourselves, and so we should be. We’ve accomplished a lot in four years at “dear old C.U.”. But don’t forget, in the parties and accolades, to be proud of your parents, too, and the others who brought you to this point in your lives and made it possible for your hopes and dreams to become realities. I know I surely am proud of mine. Thank you.”

          She began to step down from the dais, but paused. One by one, adults in the audience were getting to their feet and applauding, and the assembled members of her family joined in at last. Before she knew it, Ellen Ruth, shocked beyond words, was facing a standing ovation. Unsure what to do next, she glanced hastily to her parents. Her mother mouthed silently, “Say thank you,” but her father merely stood there, grinning, with tears on his face.

          President Baker raised a hand, and the audience seated themselves again as the orchestra began the stirring strains of Elgar’s _Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1. **[1]**_

  ***     ***     ***

          As was usual when one of the Heyes or Curry offspring graduated, an enormous family picnic was bound to ensue. Ellen's sister Meg and her oldest cousin Edith, with their husbands, had slipped out as soon as Ellen’s speech had ended, with the intent to stake out the best place for the picnic while the graduates were walking across the stage to receive their diplomas. As their family group alone numbered eighteen people, a good spot was essential.

          Once the ceremony ended, the rest of the family joined them on the tree-shaded lawn between Hale Science building and Varsity Pond. Ellen herself arrived presently, with a friend in tow. “Mom, Dad, this is Renata Hoff,” she said, breathless, as she embraced her parents warmly. “I asked her to join us because all her family is in Switzerland and couldn’t come. She’s been helping me with my French and German recitations.”

          Margaret and Edith were busily unpacking ham sandwiches, cold chicken, strawberries, homemade pickles, fruit salad, cake, and cookies. Before long, the last person they were waiting for came across the grassy, tree-lined quadrangle toward them—Marshal Trevors. “Over here, Lom!” Hannibal Heyes called out, and presently the white-haired old marshal, now almost seventy, arrived to join them. He blinked at the assemblage in astonishment. There were Heyes and the Kid, and their wives, along with their nine children. In addition, the two husbands, one wife and children of the three oldest were there as well. The youngest of the grandchildren, Emily Heyes, was sitting on Kid’s lap playing with the ends of his bolo tie.

          “My word,” said Trevors, impressed. “Looks like a gathering of the clan…”

          Heyes grinned. “Well, you’re not wrong,” he chuckled. “Since my mother was Kid’s Aunt Maureen, that’s exactly what it is.”

          Ellen Ruth leaped up and ran to Marshal Trevors, hugging him like a long-lost uncle. She looked up at him with tears in her grey eyes. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” she said, choked up. “None of us, not one, would be here if it weren’t for you.”

          “She’s right, Lom,” said Kid Curry, gravely but with a smile. “You’ve got quite a legacy here. Look at how your little meeting with the governor turned out.”

 

* * *

[1] Already used at a number of American universities’ commencement exercises before this date. I decided to include my _alma mater,_ CU, as one among them. Source:  <http://www.elgar.org/3pomp-b.htm> “Why Americans Graduate to Elgar”.

 


End file.
